


havoc wrecks itself to sleep

by Rowantreeisme



Series: Whumptober 2019 [1]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Body Modification, Extremis (Marvel), Gen, Mental Health Issues, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-02
Updated: 2019-10-02
Packaged: 2020-11-15 01:44:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20858174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rowantreeisme/pseuds/Rowantreeisme
Summary: Whumptober day 1: shaking handsThe pressure behind her eyes has morphed into something that actually hurts, pain pulsing with the beat of her heart, and it only gets worse when the door to the workshop slides open, when the EMR signals for every piece of online tech in the shop, the intranet and the internet and various IR and radio waves that should get processed into a visual overlay skipping extremis’s sort/process function altogether and ends up translating as bright white visible light and a screeching cacophony of sound.





	havoc wrecks itself to sleep

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tin_Can_Iron_Man](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tin_Can_Iron_Man/gifts).

> this is just OC fic yall. feat. @tin_can_iron_man 's OC Carla Stark, and my OC Jamie STark.
> 
> title from Oak by the Ballroom Thieves

When she wakes up, she already knows that the day isn’t going to be a good one. There’s a pressure behind her eyes, a kind of dull, throbbing sensation, not quite pain but  _ almost _ . 

She pokes at extremis, still laying in bed, tells it to  _ knock it the hell off _ , and gets an error code back. The pressure doesn’t let up even a little.

She makes a frustrated noise, pushes a little deeper. It’s not her analog systems causing this, she knows, because all her analog systems are perfect now. She  _ knows _ that it’s extremis futzing out somewhere, some misplaced line causing it to output sensory data that shouldn’t exist, but she can’t find the problem, even after a handful of minutes digging through the somatosensory processing. 

With a sigh, she rolls out of bed and writes a piece of code, quick and dirty, and tells it to look for any sensory output that doesn’t have a matching input and trace it to the root. With any luck, it’ll find the bug before breakfast, and she won’t have to worry about this anymore. 

Except, there’s nothing back even in the ten or so minutes —  _ 10:14.2601  _ extremis tells her, helpfully — it takes for her to grab a bagel and drop the elevator down to the workshop. Which is weird. 

The pressure behind her eyes has morphed into something that  _ actually _ hurts, pain pulsing with the beat of her heart, and it only gets worse when the door to the workshop slides open, when the EMR signals for every piece of online tech in the shop, the intranet and the internet and various IR and radio waves that  _ should _ get processed into a visual overlay skipping extremis’s sort/process function altogether and ends up translating as bright white visible light and a screeching cacophony of sound. “Fuck!” She snaps, squeezing her eyes shut reflexively even though it doesn’t help at  _ all, _ skin prickling like she’s covered in ants. 

“Miss…” She hears, WARD’s concerned voice, and that hurts too, too  _ much _ and too fast and too  _ bright _ and it takes barely a microsecond for her to reach out and crush  _ everything _ .

All at once, everything in the workshop goes dark and dead, and she opens her eyes one at a time, and the pitch-black is a relief. She takes a second, take a breath — the feeling of air filling her lungs, the blood o2 readouts and the graph of inflation/deflation that extremis throws at her, is  _ not _ helping — and she reaches out, gentler this time, and allows WARD to slip back into the workshop systems. “Sorry.” She says, sits heavily in a stool as she tries and fails to close all non-essential extremis systems. 

She does  _ not _ need to be seeing a real-time tracer of all the blood cells in her body right now,  _ fuck _ , but the fact that she can  _ see _ her blood o2 decreasing steadily as her breathing gets faster and shallower is… not great.  _ Christ _ , she’s all over the damn place, here. Her  _ adrenal _ gland is acting up in a big way, for  _ some _ fucking reason, and she can feel the faint tingle in her hands and feet as all the blood in her body is rerouted to her heart and lungs, the big muscles she’ll need for fight-or-flight.

A good response, a quick one, one that is definitely  _ not _ correct for the situation she’s in. 

Since extremis isn’t doing it, she goes in manually and shuts off adrenaline production, forces her kidneys into overdrive so she can flush it out of her body as quickly as possible.  _ Fuck, if this whole thing has just been a leftover adrenyl responce from a nightmare or some bullshit—  _ she thinks, and then is very glad that she’s already sitting down because the adreniline crash turns all her muscles into jello for —  _ 5s1200ms —  _ about five seconds. She  _ doesn’t _ need the exact timing down to milliseconds,  _ thank you _ , extremis. 

WARD is saying something, presumably asking if she’s ok, both through the speakers and through the network, the questions coming through simultaneously even though the network ping is orders of magnitude quicker, but she can’t register either of them. The inputs jumble with the sound of her heart and the woosh of her lungs and the weirdly squishy sound of her stomach, all of which extremis is amplifying and feeding directly into her analoge auditory systems like they’re something she  _ needs _ to hear, right this second, and she can’t seem to grasp onto any of the feeds to prioritize them properly and for a long moment it’s just  _ noise _ . 

It feels like her eardrums are gonna burst from the noise,  _ damn _ , and she knows they’re not going to because it’s dead silent in the workshop aside from the deafening rustle of her clothes but it  _ feels  _ that way, and fuck fuck  _ fuck  _ but it  _ hurts _ . 

Ward is  _ still  _ trying to ping her and she opens an open comms channel, sends him a package of data from extremis, garbage in/garbage out but at least he’ll know what she’s dealing with and that she’s not, like,  _ dying _ or anything, and the digital equivalent of a thumbs up and  _ shhhhhh _ . Channel closed, because even  _ that _ protected and encrypted dataset was getting fucked over by extremis and she’s sure that she sent a  _ lot  _ of garbage out, she braces herself. And finds the routing system for her thalamus and tries to run a force-restart it so it stops parsing everything as  _ pain _ . It’s down for a fraction of a fraction of a second —  _ 00:00.013 —  _ and she  _ still doesn’t need the fucking exact microsecond timing of every fucking thing she does, thank you _ — and for that amount of time there is  _ nothing _ . 

No sensory input of any kind — aside from olfactory, because that doesn’t route through the thalamus at all, so she can smell the distinct scent that means  _ workshop _ , chemical and ozone and metal — no sound or sight or feeling, at  _ all,  _ she’s trapped in a black and silent void and she can’t even tell if she  _ has _ a body, piroreception routs through the thalamus too and  _ fuck fuck fuck  _ this may have been a mistake but at least she can  _ think _ now, and then the reboot is complete and everything comes slamming back into her like she’s been hit by a speeding freight train.

_ Feels _ like it too, fuck. Her side, shoulder and hip and the side of her face, ping damage reports at her noisily, and extremis tells her about ruptured capillaries and increased blood-flow and clotting action.  _ Bruise? But—  _

_ [position change detected; calibrating] _

Carla’s sense of where the horizon is flips so suddenly that her stomach turns, and she just barely stops herself from throwing up. 

That’s why she’s bruised, she’s on the floor. Must’ve fell off the stool when her thalamus rebooted,  _ fuck _ .  _ Note to self,  _ she thinks, making no effort to push herself up —  _ something’s _ interfacing weirdly with proprioception and making her feel like she’s being tossed around like a sack of flour —  _ don’t reboot any extremis systems that are directly connected to wetware unless you’re lying down. _

And, of course, the worst part: it hasn’t helped at  _ all _ . Extremis is still shunting inputs to the wrong outputs and in too much volume for her to even start processing them consciously, amplifying tiny signals until she couldn’t tell the miniscule apart from the massive. 

_ [bad bad this is bad what the fuck is happening—]  _

Something is wrong with extremis. Something is wrong with her code, and she doesn’t— she doesn’t know  _ what. _ For all she can tell there’s  _ nothing _ wrong but there has to be  _ something _ wrong because this  _ should not be happening. _

So. Extremis is the problem. She can’t  _ fix _ it because she can’t  _ think _ , and she can’t think because she’s being overloaded by about 16 seperate kinds of sensory input at once. Catch-22, paradox,  _ unfixable _ . 

Solution: disable extremis, get her  _ mind _ back, get it so she can think without wanting to claw her brain out through her ears, and fix it. 

Problem: extremis is so interconnected to her body’s systems that disabling all of extremis would most likely kill her.  _ Possibly _ it would take some time, and there’s a chance she’d be able to fix it and reboot it before she actually died but it’s not a chance she wants to take. Not at this stage, at least. If this gets worse—

Well. If it gets worse it might kill her anyways.

So. She has to find a way to stop extremis from overloading, and she has to do it without shutting the entire system down. And she has to do that  _ while _ she is being overloaded by extremis. Fucking.  _ Fantastic. _

Focus. Fuck,  _ focus. _ Extremis is contributing to an already hellish sensory overload, so the solution— 

Is to stop extremis from collecting or sending her any more sensory data. Right. That’s— she can do that. She’s pretty sure she can do that. 

_ [change user permissions: user: extremis {system: sensory}]  _

_ [Photosensory: Read/Write —> Deny Access] _

_ [Proprioception: Read/Write —> Deny Access] _

_ [Wireless Reception: Read/Write —> Deny Access] _

_ [Somatosensory: Read/Write —> Deny Access] _

One after another, the systems being overloaded by extremis cut, goes dead, goes dark, and it is quiet. 

...It is very, very quiet. Carla… hadn’t realized just how used she’d gotten to the constant input, the  _ noise _ , of all the information Extremis fed her, and now that she’d cut  _ all _ of her extrasensory feeds, now that she’d cut extremis down to it’s most vital functions, it felt like she’d been blinded. 

It felt like she’d lost a limb. Like there was something that was supposed to be there, and  _ wasn’t _ , like… 

Like a hole, somewhere insubstantial and undefined. 

She nearly gave extremis all it’s permissions back right then,  _ damn _ the consequences, the lack of input like being dropped into a sensory deprivation tank, even though she  _ knows _ that she  _ can _ still see. Her eyes, her ears, her body still works. 

One breath. Stave off the panic. Don’t  _ fucking _ panic, she tells herself, and… doesn’t quiet manage. 

It feels like someone’s sneaking up on her, like there’s someone breathing down her neck, even though logically, she  _ knows _ she’s safe, she’s in the workshop, she’s in the safest damn place in the building, and yet she can’t help twitching at the smallest noise, the tiny noises that sound so  _ goddamn _ loud.

It’s still so, so very loud, and bright, and she wants to claw her fucking  _ skin  _ off, it feels like she’s covered in ants, the brish of her clothes agianst her arms and legs and stomach maddening and  _ fuck, fuck but that didn’t fix anything, why didn’t cutting extremis not fix this? _

Extremis isn’t giving her input anymore, so why does it still feel like too much? Why can she  _ still _ not  _ think?  _

_ No, _ she thinks, frantic,  _ no this should be fixed this is wrong this isn’t right, _ because this feels— she  _ knows _ what this is now, she knows what this is because it’s happened to her before, so many goddamn times she could practically run a  _ clock _ by the ways her brain betrayed her, but she’d  _ fixed _ it, extremis should’ve  _ fixed _ it, she shouldn’t—

She shouldn’t be  _ broken _ anymore. This shouldn’t be  _ happening _ . She shouldn’t want to curl up in a ball somewhere dark and quiet and still want to claw her eyeballs out of her skull because no matter how dark it actually is it’s still too  _ bright _ , she shouldn’t flinch at every tiny rustle of her clothes, at the sound of her heart in her ears, loud, too  _ loud _ , like a goddamn drum. 

She hates this. She  _ hates _ this, and she doesn’t know how to  _ fix  _ it, becuase she thought she  _ had _ fixed it but apparently, no,  _ fuck _ no, her brain hates her and nothing can go  _ right _ . 

But maybe—  _ Maybe—  _

She’s writing the short code lines even as she acknowledges that this could be a very,  _ very _ bad idea. 

_ [Sys.exit(system:photoreception)] _

_ [Sys.exit(system:auditory)] _

_ [sys.exit(system:somatosensory)] _

And that is worse than when she’d cut extremis’s access, when she’d rid herself of those extra senses. That is worse, so  _ so  _ much worse, without her sight, without her hearing, without any sense of her body, at all. Just  _ nothing _ , like when she’d force-rebooted her thalamus. Exactly like that, but it’s not for just a fraction of a second, it’s for longer, it goes on, and on, and  _ on _ , until it feels like she’s been in this dark, silent void for an eternity. 

She  _ knows _ it’s only been a couple seconds but it doesn’t  _ feel _ like it but  _ fuck at least it’s quiet now _ . 

Breath in. Breath out. Breath in, even though she can’t feel her lungs inflate, even though she can't feel the strain in her ribs when she inhales too deeply. She can’t feel herself breathing.

_ [Am I even breathing? How can I even tell if I am breathing? What if I can't breathe because i can’t feel it and i’m going to suffocate because i can’t feel that i am what if I’m dying what if i don’t know what if—] _

_ [shut up shut up shut up extremis still has access to autonomic functions it’ll keep me breathing im not going to die i’m not i’m not] _

…

_ [maybe im already dead maybe  _

_ {bloodO2 0% WARNING}  _

_ no shut up that’s not real i’m alive i’m alive i’m breathing i have to be i have to be shut UP] _

And it's not quiet. It’s not, it’s  _ not _ because she’s panicking and her brain refuses to shut up and the layers and layers and  _ layers _ of thoughts ricocheting through her skull like angry wasps  _ hurt _ . 

Her head  _ hurts _ , and cutting herself off hasn’t even  _ helped _ , which makes no  _ sense _ because this is a  _ sensory overload  _ and she’s cut  _ off _ all her senses, and now it feels like her brain is trying to tear itself apart, like her head without any imput is now— now— just a goddamn echo chamber, every tiny fucking thought being amplified into something deafining and she still can’t know that she’s not  _ dying _ . 

_ [ALERT: sys.ALVEOLAR{pCO2 > 100mmHg} {pO2 > 100Hg}]  _

That’s real. The warning traces back to extremis, when she checks,  _ not _ back to her own misfiring brain —  _ my brain and extremis are connected it might not be real you don’t know it’s real, how can you trust anything — _ and it takes her painfully long to realize what the warning means. 

_ Oh _ , She thinks,  _ I’m hyperventilating.  _

_ [access sys.LUNG: output capacity/time compareto: normal defined as: {average 2-month t= 07:00-13:00}] _

Extremis spits a graph at her, a quickly spiking sinewave writing itself out in realtime, the peaks of how she’s breathing now smaller and much closer together than normal, sketched out behind the current data. 

She can’t— feel it. She can’t feel her chest moving or the lightheadedness that comes with hyperventilating but extremis is telling her that she is. 

The only question now, is whether she stays like this, limits input as much as she can so her stupid body can balance itself back out, or if she reallows extremis access and tries to deal with the problem while it feels like her head’s going to explode. 

It takes only a second for her to decide. 

Carla grits her teeth — still not feeling it, and  _ oh _ , that’s  _ dangerous _ , she could crack a tooth and not even notice (not that extremis wouldn’t heal it so the risk is really negligible at best but) — and turns back on her analogue senses. 

And.

_ [holyfuckingmotheroftesla shouldn’ve done them all at once god god FUCK] _

Now, Carla’s had some unfortunate up-close encounters with flash grenades (and accidental magnesium burns and massive electrical discharges and cherenkov radiation flare-ups and actual fucking  _ bombs _ ) and this? This is worse. 

This isn’t like being caught in a blast, like watching something go up in flames and not having the time to even  _ think _ “oh, fuck, i should cover my eyes,” this isn’t like any of those things. 

This— This is like  _ being _ the bomb. This is like… exploding, going nova, burning so bright and hot and loud it  _ burns _ and—

And she  _ knows _ it’s just her brain messing with her, she  _ knows _ that this pain is not real, and knowing that doesn’t dull it at all. 

(in a way it only makes it worse, knowing that it’s her brain betraying her, knowing that it’s not a bug, it’s not a glitch, it’s just something wrong with  _ her _ . Extremis fixed her scars, and it fixed the fact that her right eye has always been slightly worse than 20/20, it fixed the bend in her left index finger from when she’d broken it in the suit on her first ever fight. It hasn’t fixed this, and maybe it hadn’t fixed this for the same reason her hair is still dark and her eyes are still blue and she’s got a mole the size of a dime on her hip. Maybe it hasn’t fixed it because it’s part of her.)

((She hates the thought that this might just be part of her. An intrinsic part of who she is as Carla Stark. A thing she cannot fix.))

Things… dim, eventually. Slowly. Not enough to not hurt, not enough that it doesn’t hurt, but enough that the workshop isn’t just lost in a haze of blinding bright. Enough that she can  _ see _ , at the very least, enough that she can stand, pull herself over to the couch. She can’t fix this, she doesn’t know  _ how _ , and currently she can’t think well enough to be capable of doing so. 

It won’t last forever. She knows it won't last forever. It can’t last forever

_ [but what if it does? What if this is your life now? What will you do then? What happens if this is your life now, if you can never think the way you’re used to? What if from now on, you’re broken? Not enough, not good enough, not smart enough, because your brain is punishing you for something you cannot control what  _ if—  _ ] _

_ Shut up, _ she thinks, flopping onto the couch and curling up in a ball, hiding her head in the gap between the back of the couch and the seat _ , shut up shut up shut up _ .  _ It won’t last forever it's not going to last forever it can’t _ . 

She won’t sleep. She knows she won’t sleep. She’s done this enough to know that no matter how exhausted she is, sleep won’t ever take her. 

She can  _ work _ , though, maybe. Possibly. Hopefully, try to write a program that can help her self-regulate when things like this happen. Hopefully she can get that done and fix what’s happening  _ now _ or at least get her well enough to work properly and then she can fix it for  _ good,  _ and then — 

And then she can go back to her life. 

She just has to do this, first. 

\---

Carla’s used to working with holograms, so that’s what it looks like in her head right now, a virtual workstation that looks just like the shiny blue holograms she usually works on. 

(Even after extremis, she still does most of her designing and coding on those holograms, despite the fact that in the virtual space she doesn’t have to limit herself to how fast her hands can move, she can design in the space of milliseconds instead of the long minutes it takes outside. There’s something tactile about it, about moving and having those movements etched in light that the virtual workspace has always lacked.)

She’s using the virtual space now instead of the holograms, because, well— 

The virtual space doesn’t use actual light, and doesn’t require her to move, so she can work  _ and _ say curled up in a ball on the couch in the dark. That’s the reason. That’s the whole entire reason.

Even so, as she codes line after line, typing using the same 10-key system she has set up in the armor under the fingertips for when she has to code on the move, it’s still— a lot. 

There’s no  _ light _ , so she can’t strain her eyes, but the virtual still pipes through her optical cortex and still reads like light to her brain, so it’s still not doing favors for her headache, but she  _ has _ made progress. 

Namely, she’s managed to fix some of the problems with extremis’s extrasensory functions, mostly by running their inputs through a simple neural network — one that’s not actually directly connected  _ to _ extremis, WARD’s handling it and she cannot be more grateful for that — to determine if there’s anything actually important in the data, and then piped through a system that manually dulls the result so that when it  _ does _ end up back in her thalamus it’s not an overwhelming amount of input. 

She doesn’t have any of that  _ on _ currently — even dulled to high holy hell it’s still a lot — but at least she knows that if she needs to use that input she can without going insane. 

(She’s not thinking about combat, she’s  _ not _ , because she’s tried to fight like this before and it hasn’t ever worked, and the last time —

Well. She crashed, broke her leg in two places, and when she’d finally admitted to James what had caused it he’d told her without any sort of leeway that she could  _ not _ fight like that again.)

((But she is thinking about combat because James is in a coma and Francis isn’t functional, Toruun’s still not back and there is  _ no one but her left _ . She’ll fight like this, because she will have to, but she won’t be using the process she’s figured out for extremis. If she has to fight, that processing takes too much time to give her the information in the time that she needs. She’ll fight raw, input going directly to her brain, and it might actually kill her but it’ll be what she has to do so she’ll  _ do it _ .)) 

Meaning, she can get data sent to her from WARD now, send him bits of code to run tests on instead of hard-programing them into her body, because she’s been informed (too loudly, mind you) that that’s not good practice. She’s getting WARD to run any of the equations she needs run, mostly because she still can’t quite trust her own mind to do them without fucking it up. 

She gets him to tell her the time and—

It’s nine am. 

It’s nine in the fucking morning, and she’s so exuasted that it feels like she’s been up for about 70 hours straight without any coffee (coffee won’t affect her now and god _ damn _ if she doesn’t mourn that fact every day) and she wants to go right back up to her (black-outable) room and curl up and go to  _ sleep _ even though she knows she won’t sleep, can’t sleep, there’s still so  _ much— _

_ [you’ve been AWOL from SI for two goddamn months you can’t slow down you can’t give up you can’t stop you can’t rest you haven’t done enough not enough never enough—] _

— and she kind of wants to cry, just thinking of it. Of all the  _ work _ she has to do. 

_ [runfind.entity:JAMIE.ANA.STARK] _

_ [...searching] _

_ [...searching] _

_ [entity:JAMIE.ANA.STARK location: TOWER, Floor 67, wing W, door 67-108 — door 68-109 — door—] _

Extremis helpfully puts the security camera feeds up in her virtual workspace. It’s Jamie, of  _ course  _ it’s Jamie, and she’s got francis’s arm around her waist, her arm under his shoulders, supporting him as they walk down the hallway together, coming back from his PT appointment. Jamie’s probably gonna make him breakfast, sit next to him, just… be  _ good _ and  _ supportive _ and… kind, in the way she always is.

Carla wishes, so,  _ so _ much, that she could go and just lean into Jamie’s warmth, collect that comfort like she always does, but she’s not the only one hurting right now, and she’s not— she’s not  _ dying _ . She’s just dealing with something that she’s dealt with many, many times before, something that won't physically hurt her, that won’t  _ damage _ her. 

She shouldn’t get in the way of Jamie helping someone who actually needs it, someone who isn’t her. She doesn’t need it. She  _ doesn’t _ . 

She doesn't need to watch Jamie help Francis sit at the table, watch her start cracking eggs into a pan, tearing up pieces of cheese to stir in with the eggs. 

As if reminding her that she hasn't eaten since the bagel in the morning, her stomach growls. She grimaces, closes the security camera feed quickly. She should go eat, really, but-

But Jamie and Francis are in the kitchen, and she doesn't want to intrude. She doesn't want to just-- barge in, and demand attention, and affection, and help, when she doesn't really need it. 

She's got this. She's got this, she does, really. After all, this won't last forever. It never has before, so it won't now. 

...She just has to keep believing that. 

She can't fall into the pit of despair that tells her that this is what forever will be, she can't get trapped in the spiral that says that this time is the time that it won't stop.

_ [It's more probable now, really, because, this is the first time that this has happened now that she has extremis, and she doesn't know -- she can't know -- how that will change things. An unknown variable, an equation that she cannot solve.] _

Half of her knows that that cannot be the truth, and the other half is whispering that it could be. 

...What'll she do, if it is the truth? What'll she do, if this is how she has to exist now, overwhelmed and overloaded and halfway to falling completely apart? 

(Part of her says that she won't be able to survive. The other part says that this is how she's always survived. She does not know which to listen to.)

She drops her head into her hands, presses her fingers into her temples like if she presses hard enough she can push away the pain. 

God, these episodes are bad enough without migraines getting involved, and yet, here she fucking is. Here's another thing that she couldn't fix. Here's yet another thing that she wasn't fucking good enough to fix. 

_ [fuck, but it hurts, the photosensitivity that normally comes with these migraines (and, thanks for those, dad) made even worse by the oversensitivity.] _

_ [Sometimes, she wishes that her brain could just be normal, that she wouldn't have to deal with the times that it just hurts, for no reason that she can figure out, that she wouldn't have to deal with her mind misfiring and shorting out and telling her too many things in too little time. Sometimes, she wishes that her thoughts would just slow down long enough for her to catch them, to order them, to get them into a format that she can get to make sense.] _

She feels guilt, whenever she thinks that. Like the thought itself is in a way a betrayal, of who she is, of who her family is, like asking to give up a part of herself that hurts her is in some way giving up  _ all _ of herself, and she doesn't  _ want _ that. She’s proud of who she is,  _ damn _ proud, she’s proud of her family, both by blood and not, and she cannot give up any part of that. 

...Even if sometimes, she wants to. Even if sometimes she thinks she  _ would _ , if only so she could stop hurting, if only so she could  _ sleep _ . 

Carla shakes herself. There’s no point thinking about any of this. She  _ can’t _ change who she is or how her mind works and breaks — not yet, at least, but when this is over — and thinking about this is just— wasting time. Time that she does not have. She doesn’t just have to fix extremis, but she’s got actual work to do, too. 

She’s got whole entire armor systems that she has to integrate with extremis, she’s got projects for SI and she’s got a call scheduled with some of the leading experts in the serum and serum-like viruses, she’s gotta fix herself and she’s gotta fix the world and she’s gotta fix  _ James _ and normally that’s fine, she can handle all the things on her plate more than well enough but now—

Now it really just feels like she’s being crushed, like this thing that she normally has a handle on is suddenly too much. It’s not a feeling she likes, being surrounded by things that she knows she knows how to do and being unable to get her mind to actually  _ do _ them. It’s like being back in fucking middle school, agian, and  _ fuck _ do  _ not think of that— _

_ [Don’t remember that you weren’t able to fix what was wrong with you back then. Don’t think about how you failed. Don’t think that you had to go crawling to Jamie for help, because she was better, she was smarter, because she could do all the things that your brain refused to let you do. Don’t think about how this is the same, how you’re failing because you are broken and nothing you can do will change that—]  _

Ha, yeah,  _ fuck _ , thanks for that, brain, she didn’t  _ need—  _

Well. It’s true, isn’t it. She doesn’t  _ want _ to think about this, about any of this, about just how goddamn broken she is, but— it’s true. 

It’s true, and it feels like there’s something— something _squeezing_, around her chest, around her middle, stopping her from drawing a full breath. She can’t drop SI. She _can’t_, there’s no— there’s not a fucking _homeschool_ option here, not for SI, not for the Avengers, not for James. This time, she can’t lean on anyone because everyone there is to lean on is either in a _coma, _gone completely, or already supporting someone else. 

She can’t— she  _ can’t—  _

“Fuck,” She says, curls further into the couch, waves away the virtual workspace and watches it shatter like sheet ice as the screen full of neatly ordered code gets wiped over with random strings of letters and numbers and symbols as her hands start shaking. One problem with using a ten-key writing system based on the movement of her hands — if her hands start shaking, she’s  _ done _ . 

She can always get up a proper keyboard, maybe even one that isn’t a hologram — she keeps a couple around the workshop, sue her, she’s always prefered the tactileness of something with physical, click-click keys over holograms — and keep working, but right now even the thought of getting up, of sitting up, of looking at a  _ screen _ and hearing the click-cklick of a keyboard, makes her want to tear her hair out. 

_ Fuck _ , she thinks, and there’s a noise coming from somewhere, worming it’s way into her ears and her head and it  _ hurts _ , and it takes far too long for Carla to realize that it’s her, making that noise. That she’s whining, high in her throat as she pulls at her own hair, feeling like each strand is connected to something deeper than the skin on her scalp, like if she can pull enough she can pull out whatever is making her feel this way. 

She can feel her eyes burning, the traitorous things, scrubs her hands over her face and tells herself not to cry. She’s not— she’s  _ fine _ . She’s going to be fine, she just— She just needs to pull herself back together. She just needs to get a goddamn  _ grip _ , she just— 

Carla pushes herself up, trying and failing ignore the pounding in her head, the shaking in her hands. The fabric of the couch is prickling at the undersides of her thighs, thee bump from where she’s sitting on the edge of her pajama shorts almost equally infuriating. So. She stands, gets up, does  _ not _ fall over. 

Takes the couple steps — that feel like a marathon, the concrete's cold under her bare feet and she hates it, she  _ hates _ this — and drops down on a stool in front of a computer terminal. 

She stretches her hands out in front of her, until it feels like the webs between her fingers will tear, stretched too far, too much, closes them into tight fists. 

And gets to work. 

\---

She starts, first, on some of the less… mentally demanding tasks. Things like reading through results on various material tests that RND has sent her, signing off on further tests and adding her own recommendations. 

Well. She gets WARD to read them to her while she holds her head in her hands and mumbles her opinion to him so  _ he _ can forge her signature on whatever needs it. 

She can’t read it herself. The words swim in her vision, and she can;t hold more than half a sentence in her head for more than about 15 seconds. Even extremis — which  _ should _ be able to substitute in for her shot-to-shit short-term memory — isn’t helping with this. It’s  _ better _ when she hears things, but still, it’s not great. 

It gets to the point where WARD has to summarize whatever she has to read in bullet points so that she can even understand it — and god, she hates that she can’t force herself to understand these things that she could do in her  _ sleep _ any other day,  _ literally _ , now, she supposes, if she slips a virtual workstation subprogram into her subconscious — and even  _ then _ she has to fight for every single step. 

It takes her  _ four hours _ to go over her inbox, a task which, normally, would take just upwards of thirty minutes on a  _ busy _ day, but at least she gets things done, and the relief she feels at that is more than the shame at having a simple task like that take so long. 

She’s migrated back to the couch — she  _ still _ feels slightly nauseous, even as extremis keeps telling her about dropping blood sugars — and is, once again, curled up on it, honestly considering seeing how quickly she could have a sense-dep tank shipped to the tower. The couch is  _ itchy _ , ok, it’s not normally and she  _ knows _ this but the fibers are scratching at her skin like they’re needles, and she  _ could _ just cut her senses, again, but after last time— 

Yeah, not being able to feel herself breathing wasn’t  _ great _ . And, the chance that someone would notice a big-ass sensory deprivation tank being shipped into the tower is,,, pretty much 100%, and she doesn’t really want to answer any questions about it.

_ [sentfromENTITY.WARD (maybe a bathtub would make an adequate substitute, miss?)]  _

_ [senttoENTITY.WARD (maybe. don’t wanna get up. Gonna finish this first.)] _

WARD doesn’t respond to that, not audibly or through a message, but Carla can  _ feel _ his worry, huge and pressing like the shift of air pressure under a storm cloud, and she grits her teeth under it. 

She’ll  _ get _ this done. She doesn’t need to be coddled, and, besides, she has that conference call in about an hour and she needs to prep her info, and try to get herself into a state where it isn’t obvious that her brain is trying to shred itself. 

...Maybe that bath would be a good idea, after all. She can get WARD to take notes while she soaks, and she has to admit that the thought of having her ears underwater, dulling the world out that way, is nice. 

Plan made, she pushes herself up again. WARD’ll have the bath ready by the time she makes it upstairs. 

\---

Carla takes her conference call sitting with her knees to her chest on the bathmat with all the lights turned off and her eyes closed. It’s audio-only, mostly just a courtesy to see if any of these people have any ideas before making any plans for actual research. That’ll have to happen in actual labs, probably here just to make it easier for everyone to communicate, less time-zones in the way. She’s pretty sure that Perera — and that’s another reason that Carla’s glad that this is a voice-only call with multiple other people, because she’s not sure if she’s currently physically capable of holding a coherent conversation with von Doom’s  _ mom _ — is sitting at about eight, depending if she’s still in Munich or if she’s moved to Latveria, and for Cho it has to be about two in the morning. 

They’d all said that this time was fine, though, and really, with Hansen in LA it’s practically impossible to get a time that doesn’t put  _ one _ of them into the ass-hours of the morning. 

It had gone… fine. None of them had any bright-spark ideas, there’s still not an instant solution, and that’s— fine. That’s exactly what was expected, really. Hansen and McCoy had gone off on a tangent for a quick moment, and now Hansen’s gonna fly up to New York, pop up-country to visit McCoy before Perera can find time to fly down as well. 

Cho had declined that offer apologetically, which… fair enough, her specialty is biotech and specifically regrowing organs, skin, other tissues, with the chemistry of it all being fairly secondary. There’s no special serum involved in what Cho does, no modifications to how the bodies repair themselves at all, and Carla had known that it would be a long-shot but she’d had to ask. 

Hansen had asked about extremis, which had been— well, Carla had  _ expected _ that, mostly, because extremis, at it’s core, had been  _ her _ brainchild, but she hadn’t expected the genuine concern in her voice, hadn’t expected to feel her eyes burning at the realization that Maya was asking about  _ her _ , not the virus. 

Carla had had to fight for her composure, then, had told herself,  _ you’re an avenger, you’re a goddamn scientist, the fact that you met her as a kid doesn’t matter right now. James matters. Only James matters. _

So. She’d told Maya that she was fine, that it was working well, that there were some bugs, but nothing major, and she’d done it with a level voice while sitting curled up on the floor of a pitch-black bathroom because her brain was trying to self-destruct. 

(It’s not a lie, it’s not, because  _ extremis _ isn’t the thing that’s malfunctioning.)

So, with three quarters of the people she’d contacted now making time to come to New York to help fix James and with some ideas about where to start, Carla disconnected the call and then crawled right back into the bathtub, still full, and still warm. 

WARD had been right. It  _ was  _ a pretty damn good substitute for a sense-dep chamber, especially as big as it was. She could float square in the middle — and wow, she’d never been gladder for a three am infomercial purchase than she was currently, with the weird inflatable pillow thing that she could rest her neck on and be sure that she wasn’t going to accidentally drown — and barely brush the sides with her fingertips. 

With her ears just under water, and all the lights off, and nothing to touch aside from the water, it was almost like having her senses cut but  _ miles _ less panic-inducing because she could still breath. She could still feel herself breathing, feel her chest expanding and contracting in rhythm. 

She could work, too, a virtual workspace and the same 10-key finger typing, the slight movement starting ripples in the water. It was almost  _ nice _ , if you ignored the headache. 

So, not really nice at all, but better than she’d felt all goddamn day, at the very least. 

(She still hadn’t eaten, because her stomach still tried to revolt at any light or sound louder than a murmur, but that was fine. Extremis had compensated — had started burning fat and had  _ finally _ stopped bothering her with her blood sugar levels — and so she was fine.)

Eventually though, after a surprisingly productive float, WARD shooed her out, citing the fact that  _ Miss, you  _ will _ start to blister eventually _ , the  _ asshole _ . 

...She did have to admit that blistering all over like a grape would not be fun in this state. Not at  _ all _ . So, she’d gotten out, and was now… 

Right back in the workshop couch, trying to quiet her brain down enough to get to sleep. Like she had been. For  _ five fucking hours _ . 

See, that’s the problem with over sensory episodes: you wake up, and try to get through it, and then you can’t sleep because of how bad it is, and the tiredness only makes things worse, and _above all_ you’re bored out of your goddamn skull because you can’t _do_ _anything_, and so you lie in bed all day, and try to sleep, and you don’t sleep, and repeat. 

For days, sometimes.

Never really more than that, but. 

Extremis, so far, has been just  _ full _ of surprises. 

_ [suppose that’s what you get when you inject yourself with experimental and untested nanobots co-created by a supervillan’s son]  _

...And those are just the kind of unwanted thoughts that have been barraging her for hours now. The kind she can’t shut up or distract herself from, because her brain is currently refusing to handle any sort of input that could _be_ a distraction. She can’t watch TV, she can’t read, she can barely even focus on the steady flatness of WARD’s voice as he recites James’s real-time medical stats. 

Heart rate, high but in the green. Blood sugar, low but stable enough with the amount of glucose they’re pumping him up with. 

Temperature…

Above what’s safe. 

As it’s been for months, now. 

_ [Better than dead. It’s better than a corpse. Better to find a cure than do an autopsy.] _

The thought nearly makes her vomit. She doesn’t  _ want _ to think about this. She doesn’t want to think—

_ [You know how close it was. Just how easily you could’ve been talking to Hansen and the others about a body and not a friend. You know that it could still end that way, that it will end that way, if you don’t hurry up—]  _

_ No, _ Carla thinks, suppressing her gag reflex with a force of will,  _ James isn’t dead he’s not he’s not going to die i’m going to fix him.  _

_ He’s not dead yet _ , extremis tells her, and then, without her permission, runs a handful simulations that show just how easy it would be for James to die. One mutation in the virus, one minute where his IV isn’t full, the tiniest piece of sabotage. 

“Stop it,” Carla says, voice weak, and rough, and she’s not going to cry, she’s  _ not _ , this isn’t  _ real _ , James is alive and WARD is telling her he’s alive and he’s going to  _ stay that way _ and he’s going to be fine, even as extremis tries to convince her of the opposite, over, and over, and over. “ _ Stop _ .” 

“Miss…” WARD says, voice soft and extraordinarily careful, and Carla  _ hates this _ , 

“Not you.” She says, squeezes her eyes shut like that’ll stop the images in her head form battering at her, quick and insubstantial and so,  _ so _ hard to catch and stomp out of existence. 

_ James, dead. James, dead, again, again, again, different variations on the same theme: her failure _ . 

A nightmare that isn’t a nightmare because it’s so close to being true, that isn’t a nightmare because she’s awake. This isn’t something that’s going to go away when she wakes up.

Is a thing really a lie when it’s barely a hair from coming true? 

_ [It’s not. You know it’s not. James could die and if he does it will be your fault.] _

_ Shut up shut up shut UP _ .

Fuck, she wishes she could mute her own thoughts, have some peace, some quiet, something that  _ isn’t _ that malicious voice telling her that she’s nothing, that everything is her fault, showing her all the horrible things that could possibly happen. 

She wishes she could  _ sleep _ . 

_ [sentfromENTITY.WARD (There is a more than 70% chance that the lack of food is negativily affecting you, Miss. Perhaps a breakfast break…?)] _

...ok. She can do that. Get… saltines, or something, some juice. Maybe soup. Something she won’t have to force herself to eat. 

On that thought, scratch the crackers. The dryness, the crumbs…

Yeah, that won’t work with how her senses are acting up right now. 

She just has to get up. Stand up, off the couch, get to the elevator — the lights go on slowly so she can see where she’s going, very dim but still too bright, even though she knows it’ll be brighter in the kitchen — and stand propped against the railing. She’s exhausted. So, goddamn,  _ exhausted _ , hands shaking where she’s clutching at the railing. 

The elevator slows to a stop, and the doors open, and it’s dim in the common floor, still before dawn so the sky has only barely started to lighten, and all the lights are on low, but it’s still bright. Still too much. 

And Jamie’s sitting at the counter, twisted towards the windows and holding a mug of tea. 

Carla freezes, but Jamie’s already turning to look at her.

There’s bags under her eyes, and— Carla doesn’t think she’s ever seen her sister this exhausted. 

_ [sendtoENTITY.WARD (you didn’t tell me she was here)] _

Ward doesn’t respond to that aside from that same crushing feeling of worry tinged with smugness. Carla growls wordlessly at him. 

Only in her mind, of course, because Jamie’s already abandoning her tea on the counter and striding over to Carla, a crease in her brow that Carla knows well. 

(Her hair’s still in it’s braid, but most of it is escaping from the tie, curling loosely around her face. Either she hasn’t slept tonight, like Carla, or she forgot to take her braid out. Either thought makes something in Carla’s chest ache.)

“Carla?” Jamie says, voice wobbling, “Are you ok?”

“Fine.” Carla responds, hates herself for the heartbroken look on Jamie’s face as she walks around to the fridge, picks the first carton of juice that WARD points out as having the best nutritional/sugar balance for her. “Just catching breakfast.” 

She can’t let Jamie see how much she isn’t fine, because then Jamie will feel like she has to take care of Carla, too, and Jamie’s already holding so many people together. She doesn’t need to add Carla and all her issues to her plate. “Oh.” She hears Jamie say from behind her, “Are… I’ll make you eggs, is that alright?” 

Carla nods, takes her glass and sits on one of the bar stools as Jamie gets a pan out, starts cracking eggs into the carton. The sound of the shells snapping, the crackle of butter on the hot pan, the scrape of the pan on the burner, all grate at her ears. 

She puts her head in her hands, and waits. Sips at her juice, tries not to be so obviously hurting. She’s sure she doesn’t succeed, not with the looks she can feel Jamie aiming at the back of her head. 

(She hasn’t looked in a mirror any time in the past 24 hours or so. She’s sure her hair is a disaster. It certainly feels like it — it scratches at the back of her neck, over her shoulders, where it curls over her chest, and she’s genuinely considered taking the clippers to it multiple times last night — and she’s sure it looks worse.) 

God, she hopes that she can manage to pass this off as being tired and cranky without morning coffee. She hopes Jamie can’t see through her, this time. 

That hope is dashed completely when Jamie slides the plate of eggs in front of her, sits beside Carla, and stares, that little furrow in her brow only getting deeper. 

Carla tries to ignore her, tries to pretend that she’s focused on her eggs, but the fact that she’s mostly just poking at them, taking tiny bites — she’s never really considered the texture of scrambled eggs before, but oh,  _ now she is _ , and turns out she Hates it — probably gives her away. “Are you sure you’re ok?” Jamie asks, doesn’t reach out to touch — and Carla’s somehow but grateful and disappointed, she knows that touch would more than likely make her want to claw her skin off in this state, but also—  _ god _ , she wishes that Jamie would hug her, and also hopes she won’t because if Jamie hugs her she  _ will _ start crying — even though it’s clear she wants to. 

Clear from the way her eyes dart between Carla’s, clear from the way her hands twitch on the table, clear from the way that she’s leaning into Carla’s space, ever so slightly. “I’m sure.” Carla says, a little too snappishly, regrets it when Jamie flinches back, just a little. 

That hurts. Normally,  _ normally, _ Jamie wouldn’t even react if Carla’s a little bit harder, a little bit more liable to snap at here than usual, because Jamie’s always known that Carla would never mean it. Not directed at her. 

Normally, Jamie would just  _ get _ that sometimes Carla gets like this and that it’s nothing to do with her, but, well. 

Nothing about this day, this week, these last goddamn  _ months _ , has been in any way normal, and Carla wishes that she could make it better even as the apology sticks in her throat along with the eggs. 

_ I’m working on it,  _ Carla promises in her head,  _ James is gonna be ok. I’m gonna make all of this ok.  _

Her fork scratches at the plate when she goes to take another bite of egg, and—

Oh, look at that. Her hands are shaking, badly. Badly enough that she can’t quite manage to scoop the piece of egg onto the fork, badly enough that it’s resonating all the way up into her arms. 

Slowly, she puts the fork down, stares at her hands. 

“Carla.” Jamie says, and this time she  _ does _ reach out, as Carla stares blankly downwards, “Have you slept?”

Carla… could lie. She could. She doesn’t. “No.” She says, voice flat. She can’t seem to muster any sort of emotion to fill her voice with. “No, I haven’t.”

“You should,” Jamie says, “You should try, at least—”

“I  _ have _ been trying!” Carla snaps, spins and dislodges Jamie’s hand, “Of course I’ve been fucking— I  _ can’t sleep _ ,” She says, and her voice breaks on a sob, “I woke up yesterday morning and I haven’t slept since then and normally that’s  _ fine _ i can go that long  _ easy _ but there’s just so  _ much  _ and I’m— I’m so  _ fucking tired _ , and i don’t—” Carla stutteres, cuts herself off, “I can’t fix anything. Nothing works, and everything’s broken, and I  _ can’t—” _

She’s crying, her throat hot and thick, and she can feel the tears sliding down her face, and Jamie’s arms are around her, squeezing so tight that it feels like Jamie’s trying to put her back together with pure strength. “Oh, Carla,” She says, and Carla thinks that Jamie might be crying too, even as she squeezes back, desperate. She doesn’t want to let go. She wants to stop crying. She wants to stop being so  _ broken _ . 

She wants to  _ sleep _ . “I’m sorry,” Carla sobs, “I can’t fix myself, I can’t fix James, I can’t help Francis and he’s hurt because of me and Dad’s— I’m  _ sorry _ , Jamie, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—” Her voice breaks, and Jamie squeezes tighter, like she’s trying to envelop Carla completely. 

“Not your fault.” Jamie tells her, her own voice choked up with tears, “It’s not, this isn’t— please tell me you don’t think that all of this is on you, because— it’s not, Carla, it’s—”

_ It is _ , Carla thinks,  _ If I had been smarter, James would’ve been fixed before the fight, if James had been fixed than I wouldn’t’ve gone down, Francis wouldn’t’ve gone down, if it weren’t for me nothing would need fixing.  _

She doesn’t say this, though, just curls up in her sister’s arms and  _ sobs _ . 


End file.
